We were traveling south on Guadalupe, en route to the disc golf course when a sudden wave of panic came over me as I realized I had left my hash-pipe at home, and we would have to return to grab it. Nothing ruins a good day on the links or an acid frenzy quite like the absence of a steady supply of smokable grass. My friend, I was neck deep in both and had no patience for such a thing. Heavily dismayed, we turned the great red beast around and sped toward the corner of 32nd and Grooms as swiftly as the wind would take us.

When we get back to my place , I discover that my pipe had been in my bag all along.

“You fucking imbecile! Make me turn the goddamn car around for what? For nothing!”
The trip, however, was not a total waste. I discovered I had left my vitamin C tablets along with my lemonade and the pint of rum I had planned to drink with it. One must be fully prepared for any acid-induced disc golf adventure. Besides, the extra time would ensure that the drugs were right on top of us as we began the round. That is if we made it to the park alive. The trees lining Grooms were already starting to loom further overhead than they had almost an hour ago before we ate the first of the liquid. The stop sign at 33rd and Speedway was no longer an octagon. One of the sides was missing, and it kept haphazardly moving about on me. My mind tried to search for a word to describe this strange new shape, but none came to mind.

“Take Speedway down to 29th. We can find our way to Lamar from there. I want to see those neighborhoods, drive through those trees, stare at a house or two.” Maybe, with some luck we can scare the wits out of some upper-middle class housewife unloading groceries with her kids. She will see me in my Sevendust wife beater, leaning out the window of a beat-up Toyota Corolla, cigarette hanging out of my mouth, intensely staring at her 5-year old son while drooling madly. It wouldn’t be my fault. She decided to dress the whole family in Hawaiian shirts. What’s a proper drug person to do in that situation other than suck it in?

“Righty-oh good sir knight. 29th to Lamar. Lamar to 24th and Pease,” my driver states to confirm.

“Yes. That is the game plan. Holy sweet Jesus on a stick! Watch out man!” I scream as an armadillo the size of a red flyer runs across Speedway en route to the hookah bar.

“Dear God man! What are you screaming about?” my driver asks in a state of complete confusion.

“Did you not see that fucking thing? It had to weigh a hundred pounds.” He looked at me in a way that let me know he knew not of what I spoke. “That armadillo. Never mind.”

“Quit your babbling and stick your head out the window. You’re getting ashes on my seats,” my driver advises me. At once this seems totally reasonable. I have taken a heavy dose of psychedelic drugs. I probably hallucinated the armadillo. This reminds me of the contents of my right front pocket. So I reach down and retrieve my tin of Scripture mints with a nice dab of lysergic acid on top. I open it and pick out two fish shaped mints as I see the words of Matthew 4:17. I hand them to my driver and tell him to eat them before I grab three more out of the tin and pop them in my own mouth. There is just something so satisfying about eating LSD in this fashion. I would love have had Robert Jeffress with me yesterday when I dropped these out. The look on his face would have been worth having to listen to him.

Going down 29th, rod iron railings and stained glass windows are dancing for me, but this music is all wrong for my mind right now. I immediately seek to remedy the situation.

“Dead! We need Dead, now!” I scream at my driver while I franticly search through my case of compact discs. As I find what I had been seeking, my driver says something like, “Well, put the motherfucker in and for the love of all that is holy stop your fucking screaming.”

“Easy killer. I was simply expressing that the Grateful Dead were of vital importance to my psyche right now.”

“Keep up that screaming business and I will express my foot straight up your ass,” my driver says calmly. “Candy Man” seemed most appropriate, but “Box of Rain” came on and was immediately satisfying to me. By this time in our adventure, the lawns surrounding us were crawling, breathing, groupings of strange small creatures and the road was starting to rise and fall in front of us. I recoiled in horror when I realized we were heading to a major intersection and an important crossroads in our journey. It was time to see how my driver was doing.

“Let me see your eyes,” I say to my driver as we are stopped at the light on 29th and Lamar. He turns his head to me, lowered his Oakley’s, and as soon as they reached the tip of his nose, all was told. The black holes that were his pupils had drawn his irises past the event horizon, stretched them out like spaghetti before they collapsed upon themselves into infinite gravity and the abyss.

“My god man! You’re twisted.“

“We only have a few more blocks. I can make it,” he tells me convincingly enough. By the time we navigate the beast to the park we are nostrils deep in acid frenzy. When we pull into our spot, “Candy Man” comes on, so we sit and listen and celebrate with two more Jesus mints each.

We notice the trailer set up on the way to the first tee box, so we stop to look at the plastic. I am immediately enthralled with an orange candy plastic disc, but I soon discover it is a putter. It would be a poor decision to buy this right now. I reach into my left front pocket for my wallet only to discover that my unpsychedelified mind left it put away at home. I thank myself thoroughly for having such great foresight. Nothing is quite as bad as giving free reign of your pocketbook to someone in the midst of psychedelic drugs. Especially yourself. Moody notices me looking at the discs, offers to help.

“I like the color on this one. Nice and bright. I bet this fucker glows in the dark,” I say in an effort to maintain.

“Well, not exactly. They do make glow in the dark discs. I think I have a couple in stock. . .” Goddamn son of a monkey’s ass, I got this bastard TALKING. This will delay our game at least a half hour and completely turn this trip sour if I don’t do something fast. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my driver leaning against a tree staring down at a pile of rocks resembling white beetles.

“Hey man, let’s throw some putts before the round,” I call out, narrowly escaping the old man. I walk over to grab my driver, and then plop my bag down about ten feet from the practice basket. When I pick up my tie-died Rhyno and addressed the basket, I realized just how interesting this day could turn out. A few clanged chains later and it was time to go tee off. We were joined, unexpectedly by a former member of the United States Navy. A strange shirtless fellow with a bulging gut and some kind of tribal tattoo across his shoulders. He still wore his hair high and tight, and had a face that screamed dumb. He only stayed through the first hole, picked up his phone and said some business about needing to go pick up his wife. He’s a narcotics agent, I thought. Pig-fucker is going to get the authorities. I never, under any circumstances trust the ex-military until they have proven themselves to me. By the time we were approaching the second hole, the drugs had me seeing the life-force of every living thing between me and the yellow basket some 320 feet away. The beauty of it all made me laugh out loud. My driver looked up from the ant-hill he had discovered and asked, “What?”

“Look ahead. Have you ever seen things quite like this?” I ask in response. When I see his mouth drop, I know he saw what I did. We proceeded through the trees and finished up the hole and moved on to Three, the first throw over the creek. This is always nerve-racking without the hindrance of a head full of acid. At this point, it was almost unbearable. Fortunately, my bright pink Wraith went exactly where I had planned it to: across the fucking water. Unfortunately for my driver, his did not. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that he could avoid getting wet and still retrieve the disc.

“I just need a really big stick,” he says to me as he strides past me on a determined path for some a pile of dead limbs. He returns with a six and a half foot “stick” that’s as big around as his arm. The look on his face as he walks by is something Nicholson would make when he was up to no good. I watch him haul this log down the embankment and his biceps are ripping out of his shirt, and I wonder for a brief moment if I might be gay. I realize I am not when I turn around to see this cute little Latina girl in tight black athletic shorts and a bright pink sports bra run by. LSD tends to bring out the animal in me. My driver’s disc goes flying by me, lands up ahead. He emerges from his lie, still with that Nicholson look on his face.

“I never lost one so far,” he says happily. We make it through the next two holes with a fair amount of success and relatively little adventure. Then we ran into Six. And trouble.

When I arrive at Six’s tee box, I know I must throw my neon green Valkyrie on an anhyzer line to end up right next to the basket like I want. When I get there, everything goes wrong. My release angle is flat instead of slightly away from my body, and the natural low speed fade of the disc took it straight into the northbound lanes of Lamar.

“Oh yeah, sucks to be you. Have fun getting that one sir,“ my driver says to me while I climb the top of the hill to the street and wait for an appropriate time to cross to the median. I find a break in the flow of traffic, and make a run for it. When I get to the median, I realize it is much smaller than I had anticipated. The lights turned green and suddenly I was standing on a sixteen inch island of concrete in a sea of cars moving 35 miles per hour on either side of me. At the first sign of relief, I grabbed the disc out of the far land and hopped straight over the median and hauled ass for the other side. Only two cars had to screech to a stop to avoid hitting me. There were no collisions. I consider that a great success.

Rattled, we finish up the hole and head to Seven and the first spot to smoke a much needed bowl of pot and slam down some of this lemonade rum punch.

“Jesus Christ man, I almost got killed out there. Hand me that jug when you’re done with it,” I say to my driver. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred degrees, and we are both completely soaking in our own sweat. The trees that lined the fairway were spinning like giant brown barber poles, and the ground was breathing. My driver handed me the jug of lemonade and I took a few good swigs, and we continued to make our way through the course.

As I came to the tee box, I realize just how on top of me the drugs really were. From the box, the trees at the front of the fairway framed the rest of the hole in a fashion that made it look like some kind of pinball machine. Rings of lights were working up the trees toward the end of the fairway. A pair of mediocre drives and all-around amateur play lands a couple of bogeys for my driver and I.

Eight was rough for both of us. I hit one of the closer trees, and he ended up overshooting his upshot into the bush behind the hole. Fortunately, his disc landed in a safe zone away from the swarm of giant wasps whirling about behind the basket.

When we approached Nine, the headwind was bringing some big purple clouds to us. These puffs of smoke about ten thousand feet in the air were looming toward us, and it reminded me of the Nothing in The Neverending Story. By some miracle throughout this whole ordeal, neither of us drives into the river. I manage to pull a par out of my ass when I hit a 25 foot putt. The chains were dancing around like fucking cobras out of a goddamn basket. It amazed me that my body was still able to hurl a disc that accurately from that distance. It is amazing what the human body is capable of through muscle memory.

Ten was an interesting experience. The branches of the mesquite trees were waving around, tempting us to throw low through them so they could slap them down. My driver failed to heed the warning that he was given, and his low drive was slapped for what I was certain was the middle of the first southbound lane of Lamar. Fortunately for him, he landed just inside the road. I never gave the trees a chance by sending my Wraith high and right. I landed in gimmie range from the short position, and in a prime spot to par. The trees were angered with this and at least three of them slapped my head with a low leafy branch on the way by. We both manage to go into Eleven with pars under our belts. The clouds are really coming in now. There is a strange vibe in the air. The box is mine, and with my new wave of confidence, I decide to go for it despite this nagging urge to lay up.

“This is how you park it,” I say to my driver, right before I send my Starfire well off to the right. I knew the fade took it somewhere in the middle of the woods on the other side of the river. My driver laughs, then pulls out his putter and lays up like any sensible man who has eaten a large quantity of psychedelic drugs. I go ahead and let him throw across as I begin my search for the disc. I am surprised when I quickly see it laying next to a blue tarp. I immediately set a path for it.

It takes some time to navigate through the trees on the way to the disc. I don’t want to upset the grass-shaped worms crawling on my shoes. Who knows what they may do to me. The possibilities are endlessly nasty, so I try to focus on the bright yellow spot next to the bright blue spot up ahead. How convenient, I thought, that my disc would land near such a thing. It must be my lucky day. As I approach the disc to retrieve it, I notice the tarp waving. This was completely expected, and I went about my business of grabbing my disc. When I reached down to grab my Starfire, the tarp flew up and a loud barking followed shortly. I shit my pants a little when I see a hyena running toward me. I then realize that it was not an animal, but an angry vagrant who had just had his sleep disturbed. I manage to grab the disc and my bag while sprinting and screaming, “Sorry, man! I was just grabbing my disc!”

I run past my driver and say,” Pick it up, man. Next hole. I’ll explain later.”

Still in a jog, we reach the tee box for Twelve where I relay the previous two minutes to my driver.

“I thought I heard barking. It was a homeless guy?” he asks in awe.

“Yeah, it was a fucking bum. With big, pointy teeth. Thought it was a wild dog at first,” I say to him as he loads us another bowl. An experience like that deserves some more pot. We finish off the last of the lemonade while we’re at it. The break does us well, and we both manage to throw around the big fucking tree in the middle of the fairway and end up with decent second shots. The mulch left over after the trees were cleared for the next three holes resemble small, cedar colored snakes, and we have to stomp all over them on the way up to our discs. A couple of close-miss upshots, and we leave the hole with a pair of pars.

On the way up to Thirteen, two of those big weeds were dancing with each other in a way that made me wonder if this were the drugs or a natural phenomenon. There were two guys sitting on the box at Thirteen who had obviously just smoked a bowl of grass and had most likely not partaken in any of the fun my driver and I were onto. My curiosity got the best of me.

“Excuse me, fellas. Can you tell me what these two weeds are doing?” I ask them.

“What?” one of them asks, confused.

“These two weeds, are they getting blown over by a breeze, or is it the drugs?” I ask, making sure I am as clear as possible with them.

“The drugs, man. The drugs,” the other one says.

I was getting more able to cope with my surroundings, the trees weren’t making me laugh so hard anymore. I was now able to focus and think in a relatively clear fashion. This was going to be needed for this hole. The redone number Thirteen is a beast of a hole. I consider making a five to be a feat worthy of celebration. At this point, I was cool with a seven. We are both able to avoid trees on our drives which absolutely amazes me. Neither of us lands in a good position, and we are forced to take what we can get. I end up in the fairway at the base of the trees, my driver ends up in the middle of the trees.

“Have fun with that,” I say while lumbering toward my disc. He gets out of the woods, and I throw into even tighter woods when my Wasp goes a little over stable on me.

“And you have fun with that, sir, “ my driver pokes back at me. I manage to get myself out, and we both two putt.

Fourteen and Fifteen are surprisingly unremarkable. There are no barking homeless men, adventures into the middle of Lamar, or over-the-top visuals. After missing a putt on Fourteen, I go bogey-par into Sixteen. By this time, our bodies are covered in so much sweat, I am reminded of two-a-days, and I crave a blue Pop-Ice popsicle.

“After this, I’m going to introduce you to New Orleans Snow Balls. They’re the best fucking snow cones ever,” my driver informs me.

“Awesome, I was just thinking about how good a popsicle would be after this, but a snow cone sounds delicious.”

This bit of information gives me an added boost, and I boom my Starfire about 325 feet. Much to my amazement, my driver forearms a disc about 340.

“Damn son, that’s about the best I’ve ever thrown a disc, and you come out and just boom one like that.,“ I say, proud of the boy. A wide-right midrange, followed by a two-putt lands me a bogey, while he parks it by the basket and drops in for par.

“The box is yours, my man,” I say on our way to Seventeen.

The hole intimidates him because he prefers to throw a forearm. I think he’s going to do the right thing when I see him grip it for a back hand, but he tries to go under and between the trees. He clips a tree on the right and it sends him into the forest on the left.

I take the safer route and swing my wraith around the big tree and end up about fifty feet from the basket. I let my driver pull out into the fairway for no penalty, and he gets his second shot within thirty feet. We both two putt, and head across the river to Eighteen and the end of the adventure.

The sun was starting to come down, and the drugs kicked in a little harder. The stones in the fairway began moving about and multiplying like fucking roaches. I sent my drive out to the left into the field. My driver sent his disc low and long and managed to land himself in front of the mandatory tree. However, the bastard was going to have to stand ankle-deep in grass-colored millipedes for his second shot. I simply had to avoid the arm of the tree-man standing in front of the basket. I was unsuccessful, and landed behind the curtain of leaves hiding the basket. From this point, it takes us each two shots to sink our putters. On the way to the car, he let’s me know he took the game, and I take his word for it.

Sweating from every pore of our bodies, we climb into the red Corolla, turn on some Spanish guitar, and take off for Airport and New Orleans Snow Balls.